


all maps welcome

by Siria



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: M/M, POV Character of Color
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-02
Updated: 2013-08-02
Packaged: 2017-12-22 03:17:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/908261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's indisputable that Night Vale exists.</p>
            </blockquote>





	all maps welcome

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to dogeared for betaing!

The thing is, Carlos has checked very carefully. He is a firm believer in the scientific method, in empiricism and the power of deductive logic. So it's indisputable that Night Vale lies in the centre of a long, narrow strip of a county which takes it shape from the contours of Radon Canyon. Satellite photos show it quite clearly: the dark gash of the canyon, the blistering white sands surrounding it, the town spreading out across an area of high ground. Night Vale exists. There may be a house in Desert Creek that's not actually there, but there is verifiably an airport, and franchises of several national restaurant and clothing chains; roads snake away to the south-east, linking the town with the rest of the state. 

But the thing is—and Carlos has checked this very, very carefully—the thing is, Night Vale was formally incorporated as a community in 1824 but it doesn't appear on any maps until 1953. 

By which Carlos doesn't mean that it was too small to appear on any maps until 1953—he means that it _was not there_. The state doesn't change in shape or size between 1952 and 1953, but somehow in the space of a year there is _more_ of it on every map that he's checked. Night Vale doesn't appear on the landscape; the landscape appears around it.

*****

"Oh, _Carlos_ ," Cecil says, eyes wide. "Of course I've been outside of Night Vale! We're hardly a, a bunch of desert _rubes_ here, we're not Desert Bluffs! What sort of a question is that?" 

"Humour me. Chalk it up to a scientist's curiosity," Carlos says. Underneath the palm of his right hand, he can feel how Cecil's belly rises and falls in time with his breathing, his laughter; the fabric of Cecil's sweater tickles at Carlos's skin in a way which doesn't quite feel like wool. 

"Well, it's true that I haven't been anywhere _terribly_ exotic," Cecil says, "Mostly inside the state—but you know, there's more here than people _think_. Fly-over country is such a dismissive term—and really quite inaccurate when you think about it, planes mostly fly _through_ Night Vale."

"Yes." Carlos had been in the produce section in Ralph's last week when the sound of the ineffably singing choir of artichokes had been momentarily overpowered by the roar of jet engines. Carlos had put back the entire contents of his basket, gone home and ordered take out instead. 

"But I did spend spring term of my junior year abroad," Cecil continues, shifting closer so that his head rests on the same pillow as Carlos's. "I went to Europe and oh, what a lovely time it was! Such wonderful memories, and hardly any of them are full of eldritch screams." Every time Cecil smiles, the laughter lines around his eyes get deeper and Carlos feels the inexplicable urge to kiss the soft skin there; Cecil smiles a lot. "I slept in the flower meadows of Svitz, admired the intricate architecture of Franchia in its eerie and echoing ouroborous of stone—"

Carlos blinks. "Switzerland," he interrupts, "and France?"

"Where?"

*****

Carlos's sabbatical in Night Vale is fully funded from a fellowship that no one at his university can remember applying for, insisted on by a department chair whose words are vehement and eyes are red-rimmed. Carlos's trip here from California must have happened—there had to have been some time between his meeting with the chair and the moment he found himself driving past Night Vale City Hall in a U-Haul packed full of an assortment of his belongings and lab equipment—but his memories of it are vague and mostly filled with lights. 

He is assigned an apartment his first night in town—the realtor just laughs when he suggests viewing any others, and laughs and laughs and _laughs_ until all the hairs stand up on the back of Carlos's neck. The lease is written in something that looks like cuneiform using a substance that Carlos really, really hopes isn't what it looks like. 

Carlos's apartment looks out on the Moonlight All-Night Diner, and the Taco Bell, and the Beatrix Lowman Memorial Meditation Zone. For an apartment with no windows, it really has some amazing views of places that are several blocks from one another in opposite directions.

The Night Vale Tourism Board includes a complimentary copy of the town map in his Official Night Vale Reception Pack, together with a coupon for Big Rico's, a sheet listing all the ways in which Carlos was not supposed to contact the Sheriff's Secret Police, an envelope full of human molars, and a tiny, perfectly-formed origami depiction of a hooded figure. The map is in the form of a Möbius strip. Carlos sits on the edge of his bed and turns it around and around in his hands and never seems to find the same building twice.

*****

"Oh," Cecil says, "and while I was there, I saw the Velvet Underground!" 

Carlos frowns. Cecil has remarkably youthful skin for someone who lives in the heart of a desert, in a place where Geiger counters have been known to melt, or turn into baby snapping turtles, but he doesn't look like he could possibly have been old enough to see the Velvet Underground perform. "You saw Lou Reed play?"

Cecil looks at him as if he's said something baffling. "Who? The _Velvet Underground_ , Carlos, dear Carlos—that nation which inhabits caverns which spread beneath half of Luftknarp, all of them blind as moles and twice as diligent at their labour. And all the walls of all the caverns have been hewn from the living rock, but they are smooth and soft like velvet; when you run your hand along them, they are warm and they quiver like the flanks of a great beast which has just run for miles and miles and miles, fleeing a hunter which is inexorable, and remorseless, and seeks it not for its flesh." 

Cecil's voice has taken on that peculiar, sonorous intonation which it always has when he's broadcasting; and it may just be that the room is dim, lit only by the flickering glow of the secret helicopters as they pass by the bedroom window, but it seems to Carlos as if the words which Cecil is speaking are not quite in sync with the movements of his mouth. As if all the words he's speaking are echoes which come from a very long way away.

*****

Night Vale trembles constantly beneath its inhabitants' feet. Carlos's readings indicate that the epicentre is always located somewhere in the Dog Park, and while the quakes vary in intensity, some are strong enough that by rights the entire town should have been torn apart many times over by now. The earthquakes are so powerful that the sidewalk should crumble and buildings fall; they are never felt by anything other than the seismograph. They are not, in fact, felt by any other seismograph currently in use in the continental US. Even Carlos, standing with his bare feet planted against the soil, with his eyes closed and every sense straining, cannot feel them. 

Carlos wonders if the earth itself is trying to get away. 

Carlos wonders if something is waking up.

Carlos wonders if it's possible that there is a _crack_.

*****

"Do you remember going there?" he asks Cecil. "Or coming back?" 

"Where?" Cecil says. Carlos has never known anyone to look at him the way Cecil does. Maybe that was why it had taken Carlos a whole year to realise that he felt something in return—to understand why, the first time he had seen Cecil, it felt as if his full attention had been trained on just one thing for the first time in longer than he could remember. It had been an entirely new data set to process, and Carlos hadn't had the parameters just then. 

"Svitz. Franchia. Luftknarp." Two names that are ninety degrees from normal and one that makes no sense at all—where else, Carlos supposes, would someone from Night Vale go on vacation? He already knows, deep down, that no matter how diligent an online search he runs, he will never find a trace of those places on any map.

"Oh." Cecil frowns, thinking. "Well, the Randy Newman Memorial Airport has excellent international connections. Also excellent inter-temporal ones." 

Carlos doesn't know why it's important to push on this, but he asks, "But _you_ , Cecil—how did you get there?"

Cecil wriggles against him in delight. "I do love how you say my name, you know, as if you would never use it against me in a foul ceremony designed to rend the very marrow from my living bones!" He sounds cheerful and in earnest—Cecil is always in earnest—but there's a vaguely hysterical edge to his voice, as if he's trying desperately but unobtrusively to change the topic. 

Carlos rubs Cecil's forearm, trying to pull his attention back to the topic at hand. "Cecil."

"Your single-minded determination is impressive and attractive, Carlos! Though not quite as attractive as your perfect hair." Cecil frowns again, and shifts restlessly, rumpling the comforter beneath him. He's got that look on his face, the one that Carlos has sometimes seen when Cecil's had to think too much about the Hooded Figures, or when he's accidentally looked directly at the Brownstone Spire—a peculiar blankness, as if something is forcing him back and away, as if he's trying to forget that a scream is caught in his throat. "Well I must have… my memory isn't as good as yours, you know, so it's all a little hazy! But I know there were trains, or at least there were tunnels… and there must have been a flight, or at least there was the sensation of speed, terrible speed, and wind, and the sound of wings…" Cecil's voice cracks.

*****

" _Mijo_ , you left so suddenly!" his grandmother says. Carlos's phone is currently a vibrating pineapple but the call quality is better than you normally get with AT&T and it hasn't tried to bite him yet, so he can't make himself feel too concerned about it. He wonders if this means he is officially jaded. "Your mother said the university insisted you go, but you didn't even drop by to see me before you left! For a whole year! And it's Juana's birthday next week, you know how she gets—I hope you at least mailed her a card." 

Carlos is standing in line in Old Navy; he needs some new socks, and every other Thursday the probability is highest that the socks will be neither invisible nor made of carefully braided seaweed. He has his socks, but the line is moving slowly because only one cashier is on duty, and he's a centaur who seems largely unfamiliar with modern technology or the concept of customer service. "Well," he says, switching the phone to his other ear, "there was a deadline and you know how the administration is when it comes to those."

"Hmm," his grandmother says. "Sure." Her tone is identical to the one she'd used when he was a kid, when she knew he was the one who'd taken the chocolate cake from her pantry but couldn't prove it—affectionate indulgence just winning out against frustration. "But you be sure you send me your address, okay? I've got some care packages with your name on them. And your _abuelo_ picked up the keys for the new RV on Tuesday, so maybe we can come by for a few days on our vacation, huh? I'm sure your work can spare you for that long, and we've always wanted to see that part of the country."

Carlos tries to picture his _abuelita_ —his tall and kind grandmother, with her ready smiles and her fierce devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe—meeting one of the Angels as they carry bags of salt around town on ceaseless errands that no one wants to ask about too closely. He imagines her and his grandfather driving towards the road sign that says 'Welcome to Night Vale! Population: Indeterminate', through the Scrub Lands and past John Peter's property. ( _You know_ , supplies Cecil's singsong voice in his head, _the farmer?_ ) He tries to think about them being able to leave.

"Maybe," he said, "it would be better if we wait until the next time I'm in LA."

Carlos tries to imagine himself being able to leave.

He mails his cousin a birthday card the next day, but he's never sure if it arrives, or where, or when.

*****

Cecil kisses as if he's trying to ground himself; everywhere that Carlos touches him, he's trembling. Carlos is sorry that he's upset him, but he knows that it would be worse if he didn't ask. Carlos has no illusions about himself; for all that he's come to care about Cecil with a ferocity that scares him, that makes him stare at his own reflection in the mirror with surprise, curiosity is Carlos's besetting sin. It makes him selfish, makes him distracted, that inexorable pull towards _why, why, why_ —it always has. 

Carlos kisses Cecil in return, and rubs soothing circles into the warm, scarred skin of Cecil's back, and thinks vague thoughts about grounding, and faded atlas pages, and the roots of the Whispering Forest sinking into reddish soil; the slow turn of the earth beneath them, and the cities buried within its crust.

" _Perfect_ Carlos," Cecil says against his mouth, as his hands work at the buttons of Carlos's jeans, " _wonderful_ Carlos. I'm so glad you're here."

*****

There are things about Night Vale which have not been mapped, but which could be. There is always an Angel standing on the outskirts of town, for instance, one for each cardinal point of the compass. Each of those sentinel Angels is always singing—at least that is the term that Carlos uses in his reports, because the Angels' mouths are open and a sound emerges that is not like any language Carlos has ever heard. They sing, but what they sing isn't music. The sound they make is so high-pitched that it's barely audible to him, but it makes the hairs freeze in his nostrils and sweat trickle down his back. They let him watch with an indifference that terrifies him. 

The ground beneath their feet never, ever shakes.

Beyond them there is nothing but bleached-white sand.

*****

Afterwards, they lie twined together on Cecil's too-small bed, sweat cooling on their skin while outside, the sun rises at entirely the wrong time. Carlos runs his fingers slowly and repeatedly through the dark, wiry curls of Cecil's hair. "You know," he says, "in quantum mechanics there's the uncertainty principle." 

"Hmm?" Cecil says sleepily, turning his head into Carlos's touch. 

"Nothing has a definite position, trajectory or momentum," Carlos says. "You can know where something's going, or where it is right now, but not both at the same time."

"Neat," Cecil says, his tone rising slightly as if he's not quite sure if he _should_ find that neat or not. Which Carlos honestly finds a little baffling—he can't remember a time when he didn't find physics fascinating. 

"It's a universal constant," Carlos says, "even in a place like Night Vale." 

Cecil shifts, propping himself up on one elbow. The frown lines on his face, briefly vanished, have returned. "Carlos?"

Carlos leans forward and kisses him. "I'm not really good at stuff like this, but I'm trying to say… I guess I'm trying to say, I don't really know where I am right now, and sometimes that… concerns me. And I can't promise I won't freak out about that in the future. But I think despite everything, I'm okay with where I'm going."

"Okay," Cecil says slowly, "is this like a… are you trying to do a, a _thing_ —"

Carlos kisses him again, harder this time, fiercer, because Carlos likes universal constants and what is Cecil if not that—Cecil, who has never once wavered in his regard for Carlos, who has been Carlos's unwitting fixed point for months now. "Yes," he says when the kiss finally ends, as firmly and decisively as he knows how. 

"Oh," Cecil says, "Well. Okay, then," and his smile is as bright as the desert sun.


End file.
